A SpaceX rocket stage just crashed into the Moon after drifting through space for 18 months

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage, discarded after launching lunar landers in January 2025, crashed into the Moon on Wednesday at a staggering 5,400 mph. The impact occurred near the Einstein Crater, striking the lunar surface after drifting through space for over a year. Initially, scientists thought the visible impact would be noticeable worldwide; however, no one, including space enthusiasts with purpose-built telescopes, managed to witness it.

Even amateur astronomers who documented the event in darkness failed to capture it. NASA reportedly obtained photographs of the impact, but it may take several days for the images to be processed and released to the public. Julianna Scheiman, director of SpaceX's NASA science and Dragon spaceflight programs, explained that the crash can be attributed to a combination of solar activity and gravity forces.

Despite ejecting around one million kilograms of debris up to 100 km into space, the incident poses no threat to Earth. The abandoned Falcon 9 upper stage weighed roughly four tonnes. Although upper stages are usually designed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere or splash down in the ocean during reentry, SpaceX decided to abandon this stage, causing it to drift for 18 months before crashing into the Moon.

While there are approximately 130 million pieces of space junk orbiting Earth at incredibly high speeds, impacts are exceptionally rare. In March 2022, remnants of a Chinese spacecraft crashed into the Moon, and in 2009, NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the Moon to study the lunar dust kicked up by the impact.